How Did It Start?

Last week I tried to describe the 1948 war, starting from the shooting at a
Jewish bus on the morrow of the UN partition resolution. Some readers dispute
the timing. They insist that the war started on May 15, on the morrow of the
founding of the State of Israel, when the armies of the neighboring Arab states
entered the country.

I have seen this many times. Every serious debate about the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict raises the question: "When did it start?" Each side has its
own date, proving that the other side started it.

The Arabs started it, the Zionists assert. The conflict started with the "invasion"
of the Arab armies. ("Invasion" in quotation marks, since they entered
the territories allotted by the UN to the Palestinian Arab state, though their
declared aim was to crush the new Jewish state right at the beginning.)

The Jews started it, the Arabs assert. They began to drive the Arab population
out, leading to the Naqba ("disaster").

The Arabs started it, reply the Zionists. Why did we have to evict the Arab
population? It was because you shot at our villages after the UN resolution
of November 29, 1947.

The Jews started it, retort the Arabs. It all started with that atrocious resolution.
The UN, consisting at the time mainly of Western and Communist states, gave
a country that did not belong to them to the Jews, who did not belong to it.

Yes, say the Jews, but it really started with the White Paper issued by the
British in May, 1939, which in effect closed the doors of Palestine to the Jews
just when the Nazis were planning the Holocaust.

We had no choice, interject the British. In 1936 the Arabs started a revolt
in which Jews and our soldiers were killed all over the country.

But why did we have to do so? cry out the Arabs. Because masses of German Jews
were coming to Palestine after 1933, when Adolf Hitler assumed power in Germany.
We had to stop it, even by violent means, to prevent Palestine from turning
into a Jewish country.

Really, retort the Jews, but you started it long before, in 1929, when you
organized riots all over the country, killing lots of Jews.

We had no choice, assert the Arabs. The British government of Palestine favored
the Zionists and allowed them to settle all over.

That was our right, say the Jews, enshrined in the Mandate conferred by the
League of Nations on the British.

Who gave the League of Nations the right to confer a Mandate on anybody? ask
the Arabs. The land belonged to its inhabitants, almost all of whom were Arabs.
That’s how it all started.

But the Arabs attacked the Jews in 1919, showing how much the British were
needed.

The British had no business being here, answer the Arabs. The whole mess really
started in 1917 when the British published the Balfour Declaration, promising
to establish a Jewish "national home" in Palestine, which belonged,
at the time, to the (Muslim) Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire was dying, say the Jews, and the Zionist movement, which
was founded in 1896, had already proclaimed its right to Palestine.

But at the same time the modern Arab national movement was born, which had
an indisputable claim to Palestine and all the Arab countries.

God has promised…

Allah has ordained…

And so on.

I have my own theory about when and how the conflict started.

In 1904 Theodor Herzl, the founding father of the Zionist movement, died. Herzl
did not like Palestine very much, and started his ideological quest with the
idea of founding a Jewish state in Patagonia, an Argentine territory which had
recently been "pacified".

Herzl did not like the Turks or the Arabs, but events convinced him that the
Jews would go nowhere but Palestine. In his book Der Judenstaat, the
Bible of Zionism, he declared that the Jews would serve in Palestine as an outpost
of Western civilization against the barbarians of Asia – i.e. the Arabs.

One can argue that it was here that the conflict really started – right
at the beginning of the Zionist idea. But I have in mind an even more precise
moment.

A few years before World War I, the Ottoman Empire showed signs of breaking
up. A modernizing movement, led by army officers, assumed power in 1908. They
called themselves "the Young Turks".

Among the restless Arab population, too, revolutionary groups emerged. They
dared not yet talk about independence, but instead put forward a plan for the
"de-centralization" of the Ottoman Empire, giving its various nations
some autonomy.

A group of Arab members of the Turkish parliament, led by Rukhi al-Halidi (member
of a Jerusalem family even now prominent in Palestinian affairs) had a brilliant
idea: why not approach the Zionists and offer them an alliance against the Turks
in the fight for this idea?

The Zionist representative in Jerusalem hastened to submit this offer to Max
Nordau, the new president of the Zionist organization. Nordau had inherited
Herzl’s post after the death of the founder.

This was a historic moment, one of those moments when history holds its breath.
A totally new vista opened up: an alliance between Arabs and Jews! a joint liberation
movement!

Nordau, a famous German-Jewish intellectual, did not dream of accepting this
offer. He must have considered it crazy. The Turks were the masters of the country.
They could give Palestine to the Jews. They could be bribed. The Arabs were
powerless. They could give us nothing.

So the moment passed. Nordau mentioned the idea to the Zionist Congress in
Hamburg, but nobody took any notice.

Few people know about this episode. It is described in the authoritative book
by the late Aharon ("Aharonchik") Cohen.

The possibility existed only in theory. History is made by real people, whose
consciousness is formed by the realities of their time. For Europeans of the
early 20th century, the idea of such an alliance with the natives against an
imperial power was close to lunatic.

In retrospect, this idea could have changed history. We would have been born
into a different world.

In the autumn of 1947, when I was just 24 years old, I published a booklet
called (in Hebrew) "War or Peace in the Semitic Region".

It was an almost exact repetition of the ideas in the Nordau incident –
which I knew nothing about at the time.

It opened with the words:

"When our fathers, the Zionists, decided to set up a ‘safe haven’ in this
country, they had the choice between two paths:

"They could appear in West Asia as a European conqueror, who sees himself
as the bridgehead of the ‘white’ race, a master of the ‘natives’, like the Spanish
conquistadors and the Anglo-Saxon colonists in America. This is what the Crusaders
at their time did in this country.

"The other path was to see themselves as an Asiatic people returning to
its homeland – who sees himself as an heir of the political and cultural
tradition of the Semitic race, and is ready to lead the people of the Semitic
Region in the war of liberation against European exploitation."

With the exception of the terminology, which belonged to its time, I subscribe
to every word even today, almost 70 years later.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict began when the first Jewish colonist came
to this country in 1882, even before the official founding of the Zionist movement.
It began as a clash between two great national movements which were totally
ignorant of each other. This ignorance persists, in large part, to this very
day.

Author: Uri Avnery

Uri Avnery is a longtime Israeli peace activist. Since 1948 he has advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In 1974, Uri Avnery was the first Israeli to establish contact with the PLO leadership. In 1982 he was the first Israeli ever to meet Yasser Arafat, after crossing the lines in besieged Beirut. He served three terms in the Israeli Knesset and is the founder of Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc). Visit his Web site.
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